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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

and walking inevitably jogs loose the next sentence.
Woolf did not refer to narrative in her le er, and although effec-
tive storytelling must have a rhythmic component, this quality is
rarely present in definitions of narrative, upon which there is no agree-
ment. Narrative is generally regarded as a form that represents human
action but is not the action itself. When I tell you a story over the phone
about my fall on the street in Brooklyn yesterday, you may imagine
the street (or a street, if you have never walked down the one I men-
tion), my tumble, the kind woman who helped me to my feet, and my
discovery that I had slipped on a plastic cup inscribed with the words:
“No Spill Container.” But my story is not part of your immediate per-
ception. You imagine it.
“We seem to have no other way of describing ‘lived time’ save
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in the form of narrative,” Jerome Bruner wrote. Woolf might dis-
agree. Much of her work reaches for a description of phenomenal ex-
perience outside story form. Narrative is inevitably linked to time,
however, and as Augustine famously declared in Chapter XI of his
5
Confessions, time is very difficult to describe. This is at least in part
because time, whatever it is, is not directly available to our senses.
We don’t hear, see, smell, taste, or touch time. Paul Ricoeur under-
stood narrative as ‘lived time’ or “human time,” an inscription of the
phenomenological time of an individual consciousness onto cosmo-
logical time, time that would exist even if there were no human being
present to wonder about the strangeness of its passing. In his tripar-
tite division of mimesis, Ricoeur argued for a first level of mimesis or
a semantics of action. He believed that human beings, as a result of
our collective, cultural reality, understand human movement in the
world in a way that prefigures narrative representation and underlies
storytelling. We read the world as causal, and impose upon it begin-

3 Ursula Le Guin, “What Makes a Story?”, h p://www.ursulakleguin.com/
WhatMakesAStory.html (accessed July 5, 2017).
4 Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research: An International Quarterly
71, no. 3 (2004): 692.
5 Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961),
263-264.

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